9 ms·

Nokia had Linux on their smartphone until Microsoft bought them and stopped everything, they even shut down the app store. The OS was called MeeGo. Part of the

by z3t4 4y ago

Nokia had Linux on their smartphone until Microsoft bought them and stopped everything, they even shut down the app store. The OS was called MeeGo. Part of the Nokia team however started their own company called Jolla and still produce smartphones running Linux, they call their OS Sailfish. (ignoring the fact that Android also uses the Linux kernel). The problem with alternative phone OS:es is that in the country I live you must have either an iPhone or and Android phone because the ID monopoly and Payment monopoly refuse to support other operating systems...

sgc 4y ago
I could get by with only using banking websites in the browser. But Why does Jolla not yet support any Pixel phones? I have wanted to try it out for years, but not to the point of trying to make things work on my own.
- mariusor 4y ago
  Probably because Google does not have an equivalent program to the https://opendevices.ix5.org/ https://opendevices.ix5.org/ that Sony has.
  - sgc 4y ago
    I don't buy that at all. That is an awesome program that I did not know about. However, they also support Gemini PDA, which is only one of Planet computers devices. And Pixels are well-known to be the among easiest to flash devices out there, and there is no shortage of third party ROMs available for them. From what I read on the SF forums, it's a sort of google boycott despite the fact that flashing a rom gets rid of the google in a pixel. https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/any-chance-of-non-sony-phones-being-officially-supported-in-the-future/9560/35 https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/any-chance-of-non-sony-phones... Further, look at the list of devices they work on - not at all a list of phones easier to flash than a pixel. https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris There seems to be a lot of politics in their forums (and their past funding), something that does not interest me in an OS project.
    - mariusor 4y ago
      I was offering you the reason why there is no "official" support for Google Pixels, not why there aren't community ports. :)
      - sgc 4y ago
        Right, but I offered you a counter-example in the Gemini PDA, and an indication that there was generally no effort - or positive resistance - to deal with anything google related at all.
        mariusor 4y ago
        I remember Gemini and Jolla had a mutual agreement[1] to put Sailfish OS on the device. [1] Started from here: https://twitter.com/JollaHQ/status/1100036246754213894 https://twitter.com/JollaHQ/status/1100036246754213894
zamadatix 4y ago
Even just unlocking an Android device causes most to stop working. I can't even log into PayPal app, which I assume is mostly just a WebView, because my phone is unlocked. At the same time it is apparently fineI do the same thing from the browser on my phone?
- yosito 4y ago
  I used an Android phone with CalyxOS and microG for a year and never had this problem. There were a few apps I had a hard time getting APKs for without the Play Store, but even those I found I could side load from other devices that had the Play Store.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Or just use Aurora store! You dont have this problem because CalyxOS has a workaround for SafetyNet, i hear its pretty hacky, but it works.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      The workaround is from microG. You can get it on lineage-microg too. It has a bad name but really all that they do is replace Google's signing certificate with their own and change the OS to accept it. It's not that "hacky" IMO, you're just trusting a different party. It's just like when you install Ubuntu, you trust Canonical to sign your packages, not debian. They use the same thing to replace play services. And if you trusted Google you wouldn't be using microG anyways, you'd just use play services. The reason it gets a bad rap is because of the risk MicroG's signing key gets stolen. This is obviously higher than the risk of this happening for Google which is definitely in some highly protected HSM vault somewhere. True. Personally if I were a MicroG developer I'd keep it on a smartcard somewhere like a yubikey so it couldn't be easily copied. I don't know if they do this. On the other hand, there is more you need to do to exploit it, even if you have the signing key. You need to get the user to use some malicious software and get it on F-Droid or something undetected. Just having the private key will not net you anything. In my point of view you're trading a definitely possible but difficult possibility of a hack, for a total certainty that Google will track you every hour of every day. Personally I don't trust my smartphone with that much information anyway, but Google manages to collect so much because of their extended network. So they're able to extract much more info from my smartphone than I put into it by association. So it's an ok tradeoff for me. Everyone needs to make their own judgement on that. For that reason I don't use banking apps on my mobile anyway and I don't have a need for SafetyNet as a result.But it's nice to know that there is a possibility to use SafetyNet protected apps in some cases if I want (some detect the workaround I believe).
anthonyhn 4y ago
>Nokia had Linux on their smartphone until Microsoft bought them and stopped everything, they even shut down the app store. The OS was called MeeGo. There is a fork called Maemo Leste [0][1] that is actually still around and updated. I have it running on a droid 4, and it works pretty well. The UI is still the same Hildon UI. Definitely a fun OS and device to play around with, and interesting in that it's the only mobile OS I'm aware of that is running Devaun. [0] https://maemo-leste.github.io/ https://maemo-leste.github.io/ [1] Technically a fork of Maemo, the predecessor to MeeGo.
fractallyte 4y ago
Just a datapoint: UK banking apps work perfectly on my Sailfish phone. Jolla's Android emulation is unreasonably excellent, one of their technological gems. If other Linux devices ever lift off, this will be one of the killer features that Jolla can license out. (And why not? I'm absolutely in favor of vendors selling Linux software.) As for Sailfish - it still offers the best, most consistent, simplest UI/UX of any currently available mobile device. Edit: and I don't have to root my phone. I can SSH into it (or use the included terminal emulator with my Bluetooth keyboard) and I have access to the full Linux filesystem. For app development, there are no hoops to jump through (like Apple's developer license). Mobile Linux is already here, and it works!
- dimensionc132 4y ago
  what phone do you use?
  - fractallyte 4y ago
    Sony Xperia XA2
    - dimensionc132 4y ago
      good to know it's friendly to sailfish
      - fractallyte 4y ago
        More info (and more devices) here: https://shop.jolla.com/ https://shop.jolla.com/
      - voltagex_ 4y ago
        Just a warning with that one - if you unlock it, it will never receive another Sony OTA, and there's no re-locking. Probably less of a problem now that it's out of support. Sailfish was also really rough on it.
_carbyau_ 4y ago
"the ID monopoly and Payment monopoly refuse to support other operating systems" This is my issue. I am commonly hearing people ask "What are you, iOS or Android?" - IE as if it is inherent to the person themselves and there are only two choices. This is scary. I love the idea of having an alternative to iOS and Android. But I also need to function within society. This shouldn't be a choice.
- 3np 4y ago
  Fortunately, we don't have the government handing out free handset so opting out is still a legal right and a practically realistic option. My concern is that if few enough people do so, this will no longer be the case for long.
  - nivenkos 4y ago
    Is it though? Not long ago many European countries required some form of digital COVID pass for travel. Likewise for doing taxes e.g. here in Sweden BankID and Kivra are practically required unless you want to be waiting weeks for letters and queueing at the office.
    - dailykoder 4y ago
      You could've gotten the QR-Code on a piece of paper, without a phone (which still is ridiculous that they forced people to use some random QR-Code and ignored the internationally accepted vaccination card of the WHO)
    - Legogris 4y ago
      Last time I tried (granted, years ago), BankID was still relatively straight-forward to set up and use on a PC. Not all sites support the flow, though. Authorities should also still accept alternatives like Freja (if there's anything they won't close the door on it's making it straightforward to pay your taxes, I guess). I'm far from happy wit the situation and would prefer that authorities take an open standards-approach compatible with FLOSS. But it's also not as terrible as it may seem at first.
nyx_land 4y ago
Sailfish could have been great, but Jolla apparently tried to overextend themselves making hardware and software for their products and almost died trying. It's a shame because the Jolla phone had a swappable back part and could have things like a slideout keyboard that looked really sweet. Now they're on the enterprise and government contracting grind and market their OS on their site with all the bs enterprisey jargon, with Sailfish as a community/open-source driven project being mostly an afterthought. They also have a very limited number of devices that can run android compatibility, and you need to pay for a license. It's a shame because their UI is the only decent thing in the world of Linux phones that isn't an utter travesty that just tries to bend the Linux desktop into being a "mobile OS" that runs like absolute shit and feels really awkward to use. But the UI on Sailfish is of course the proprietary parts aside from the android emulation.
- outsomnia 4y ago
  Gnome 3 on a phone is actually quite nice.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    Do you mean phosh? As far as I know it is written from scratch, not based on gnome, only in design.
- webmobdev 4y ago
  You can still buy a supported Sony Open Devices phone ( https://static.developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/get-started/supported-devices-and-functionality/ https://static.developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/get-s... ) and a Jolla license ( https://shop.jolla.com/ https://shop.jolla.com/ ) to install the OS on it just like we do with desktop / laptop computers.
pxc 4y ago
I took a real interest in 6 or 7 years ago, when it was first coming out. I was excited in part by how much it (as a downstream project of MeeGo) resembled Real Linux™ internally: systemd, RPM/zypper, Wayland. It was awesome. The way it all fit together felt thoughtful and sane. The terminal environment was like a real desktop Linux userland. And the Sailfish UI was really outstanding. It was simple, uniform, and thoroughly gesture-based. That stuff felt decidedly ahead of Android and iOS at the time. But it's basically been impossible since then to get it on flagship or even just relatively recent hardware, and getting it distributed with the unfortunate but crucial Android app runtime has been very hard to do since it's only available on commercial distributions. It's never felt like a real option for me, at least in the US. Since I followed it more closely, I don't know where the project stands. Last I heard, they were pivoting to other markets (developing economies, business/enterprise use) that made it seem unlikely I'd ever get to have a decent Sailfish experience.
- distances 4y ago
  I also got the first Jolla phone, but I had a different experience. I found it somewhat unintuitive to use (lots of misswipes, and unclear what you could swipe and when), but my main gripe was the UI style. It was a disappointment after the absolutely gorgeous Meego UI in N9. I used it for two weeks, switched to Android, and started learning Android development. I probably started with unrealistic expectations, and I obviously don't want to belittle their work, but I think there are good reasons it flopped even in it's native market in Finland after the early excitement. In any case it was a small miracle that such a small company managed to create and ship an independent Linux smartphone with their completely own UI to general public, with a full set of basic requirements from a browser and app store to a calculator and email app. An amazing feat.
  - jcelerier 4y ago
    Interesting, to this day I remember the Jolla as the only phone I ever had that I actively enjoyed using
- mariusor 4y ago
  I've been running Sailfish OS since they launched. Currently I do it on a Sony Xperia 10 III. It does all the things expected of a phone.
josteink 4y ago
> The problem with alternative phone OS:es is that in the country I live you must have either an iPhone or and Android phone because the ID monopoly and Payment monopoly refuse to support other operating systems... In theory its possible to run a user-land Android subsystem on Linux (and thus on Linux phones) via Anbox or Waydroid. In practice, I've never tried this on my PinePhone since I never needed it, so I have no idea how well this works or of it works at all. [1] https://anbox.io/ https://anbox.io/ [2] https://github.com/waydroid/waydroid https://github.com/waydroid/waydroid
lrvick 4y ago
Carry plastic ID. Carry cash. I do not know any first world country that has a constitution that requires you accept the terms of service of Apple or Google to function as a citizen.

by z3t4 4y ago

sgc 4y ago

I could get by with only using banking websites in the browser. But Why does Jolla not yet support any Pixel phones? I have wanted to try it out for years, but not to the point of trying to make things work on my own.

mariusor 4y ago
Probably because Google does not have an equivalent program to the https://opendevices.ix5.org/ https://opendevices.ix5.org/ that Sony has.
- sgc 4y ago
  I don't buy that at all. That is an awesome program that I did not know about. However, they also support Gemini PDA, which is only one of Planet computers devices. And Pixels are well-known to be the among easiest to flash devices out there, and there is no shortage of third party ROMs available for them. From what I read on the SF forums, it's a sort of google boycott despite the fact that flashing a rom gets rid of the google in a pixel. https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/any-chance-of-non-sony-phones-being-officially-supported-in-the-future/9560/35 https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/any-chance-of-non-sony-phones... Further, look at the list of devices they work on - not at all a list of phones easier to flash than a pixel. https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris There seems to be a lot of politics in their forums (and their past funding), something that does not interest me in an OS project.
  - mariusor 4y ago
    I was offering you the reason why there is no "official" support for Google Pixels, not why there aren't community ports. :)
    - sgc 4y ago
      Right, but I offered you a counter-example in the Gemini PDA, and an indication that there was generally no effort - or positive resistance - to deal with anything google related at all.
      - mariusor 4y ago
        I remember Gemini and Jolla had a mutual agreement[1] to put Sailfish OS on the device. [1] Started from here: https://twitter.com/JollaHQ/status/1100036246754213894 https://twitter.com/JollaHQ/status/1100036246754213894

zamadatix 4y ago

Even just unlocking an Android device causes most to stop working. I can't even log into PayPal app, which I assume is mostly just a WebView, because my phone is unlocked. At the same time it is apparently fineI do the same thing from the browser on my phone?

yosito 4y ago
I used an Android phone with CalyxOS and microG for a year and never had this problem. There were a few apps I had a hard time getting APKs for without the Play Store, but even those I found I could side load from other devices that had the Play Store.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Or just use Aurora store! You dont have this problem because CalyxOS has a workaround for SafetyNet, i hear its pretty hacky, but it works.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    The workaround is from microG. You can get it on lineage-microg too. It has a bad name but really all that they do is replace Google's signing certificate with their own and change the OS to accept it. It's not that "hacky" IMO, you're just trusting a different party. It's just like when you install Ubuntu, you trust Canonical to sign your packages, not debian. They use the same thing to replace play services. And if you trusted Google you wouldn't be using microG anyways, you'd just use play services. The reason it gets a bad rap is because of the risk MicroG's signing key gets stolen. This is obviously higher than the risk of this happening for Google which is definitely in some highly protected HSM vault somewhere. True. Personally if I were a MicroG developer I'd keep it on a smartcard somewhere like a yubikey so it couldn't be easily copied. I don't know if they do this. On the other hand, there is more you need to do to exploit it, even if you have the signing key. You need to get the user to use some malicious software and get it on F-Droid or something undetected. Just having the private key will not net you anything. In my point of view you're trading a definitely possible but difficult possibility of a hack, for a total certainty that Google will track you every hour of every day. Personally I don't trust my smartphone with that much information anyway, but Google manages to collect so much because of their extended network. So they're able to extract much more info from my smartphone than I put into it by association. So it's an ok tradeoff for me. Everyone needs to make their own judgement on that. For that reason I don't use banking apps on my mobile anyway and I don't have a need for SafetyNet as a result.But it's nice to know that there is a possibility to use SafetyNet protected apps in some cases if I want (some detect the workaround I believe).

anthonyhn 4y ago

>Nokia had Linux on their smartphone until Microsoft bought them and stopped everything, they even shut down the app store. The OS was called MeeGo. There is a fork called Maemo Leste [0][1] that is actually still around and updated. I have it running on a droid 4, and it works pretty well. The UI is still the same Hildon UI. Definitely a fun OS and device to play around with, and interesting in that it's the only mobile OS I'm aware of that is running Devaun. [0] https://maemo-leste.github.io/ https://maemo-leste.github.io/ [1] Technically a fork of Maemo, the predecessor to MeeGo.

fractallyte 4y ago

Just a datapoint: UK banking apps work perfectly on my Sailfish phone. Jolla's Android emulation is unreasonably excellent, one of their technological gems. If other Linux devices ever lift off, this will be one of the killer features that Jolla can license out. (And why not? I'm absolutely in favor of vendors selling Linux software.) As for Sailfish - it still offers the best, most consistent, simplest UI/UX of any currently available mobile device. Edit: and I don't have to root my phone. I can SSH into it (or use the included terminal emulator with my Bluetooth keyboard) and I have access to the full Linux filesystem. For app development, there are no hoops to jump through (like Apple's developer license). Mobile Linux is already here, and it works!

dimensionc132 4y ago
what phone do you use?
- fractallyte 4y ago
  Sony Xperia XA2
  - dimensionc132 4y ago
    good to know it's friendly to sailfish
    - fractallyte 4y ago
      More info (and more devices) here: https://shop.jolla.com/ https://shop.jolla.com/
    - voltagex_ 4y ago
      Just a warning with that one - if you unlock it, it will never receive another Sony OTA, and there's no re-locking. Probably less of a problem now that it's out of support. Sailfish was also really rough on it.

_carbyau_ 4y ago

"the ID monopoly and Payment monopoly refuse to support other operating systems" This is my issue. I am commonly hearing people ask "What are you, iOS or Android?" - IE as if it is inherent to the person themselves and there are only two choices. This is scary. I love the idea of having an alternative to iOS and Android. But I also need to function within society. This shouldn't be a choice.

3np 4y ago
Fortunately, we don't have the government handing out free handset so opting out is still a legal right and a practically realistic option. My concern is that if few enough people do so, this will no longer be the case for long.
- nivenkos 4y ago
  Is it though? Not long ago many European countries required some form of digital COVID pass for travel. Likewise for doing taxes e.g. here in Sweden BankID and Kivra are practically required unless you want to be waiting weeks for letters and queueing at the office.
  - dailykoder 4y ago
    You could've gotten the QR-Code on a piece of paper, without a phone (which still is ridiculous that they forced people to use some random QR-Code and ignored the internationally accepted vaccination card of the WHO)
  - Legogris 4y ago
    Last time I tried (granted, years ago), BankID was still relatively straight-forward to set up and use on a PC. Not all sites support the flow, though. Authorities should also still accept alternatives like Freja (if there's anything they won't close the door on it's making it straightforward to pay your taxes, I guess). I'm far from happy wit the situation and would prefer that authorities take an open standards-approach compatible with FLOSS. But it's also not as terrible as it may seem at first.

nyx_land 4y ago

Sailfish could have been great, but Jolla apparently tried to overextend themselves making hardware and software for their products and almost died trying. It's a shame because the Jolla phone had a swappable back part and could have things like a slideout keyboard that looked really sweet. Now they're on the enterprise and government contracting grind and market their OS on their site with all the bs enterprisey jargon, with Sailfish as a community/open-source driven project being mostly an afterthought. They also have a very limited number of devices that can run android compatibility, and you need to pay for a license. It's a shame because their UI is the only decent thing in the world of Linux phones that isn't an utter travesty that just tries to bend the Linux desktop into being a "mobile OS" that runs like absolute shit and feels really awkward to use. But the UI on Sailfish is of course the proprietary parts aside from the android emulation.

outsomnia 4y ago
Gnome 3 on a phone is actually quite nice.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Do you mean phosh? As far as I know it is written from scratch, not based on gnome, only in design.
webmobdev 4y ago
You can still buy a supported Sony Open Devices phone ( https://static.developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/get-started/supported-devices-and-functionality/ https://static.developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/get-s... ) and a Jolla license ( https://shop.jolla.com/ https://shop.jolla.com/ ) to install the OS on it just like we do with desktop / laptop computers.

pxc 4y ago

I took a real interest in 6 or 7 years ago, when it was first coming out. I was excited in part by how much it (as a downstream project of MeeGo) resembled Real Linux™ internally: systemd, RPM/zypper, Wayland. It was awesome. The way it all fit together felt thoughtful and sane. The terminal environment was like a real desktop Linux userland. And the Sailfish UI was really outstanding. It was simple, uniform, and thoroughly gesture-based. That stuff felt decidedly ahead of Android and iOS at the time. But it's basically been impossible since then to get it on flagship or even just relatively recent hardware, and getting it distributed with the unfortunate but crucial Android app runtime has been very hard to do since it's only available on commercial distributions. It's never felt like a real option for me, at least in the US. Since I followed it more closely, I don't know where the project stands. Last I heard, they were pivoting to other markets (developing economies, business/enterprise use) that made it seem unlikely I'd ever get to have a decent Sailfish experience.

distances 4y ago
I also got the first Jolla phone, but I had a different experience. I found it somewhat unintuitive to use (lots of misswipes, and unclear what you could swipe and when), but my main gripe was the UI style. It was a disappointment after the absolutely gorgeous Meego UI in N9. I used it for two weeks, switched to Android, and started learning Android development. I probably started with unrealistic expectations, and I obviously don't want to belittle their work, but I think there are good reasons it flopped even in it's native market in Finland after the early excitement. In any case it was a small miracle that such a small company managed to create and ship an independent Linux smartphone with their completely own UI to general public, with a full set of basic requirements from a browser and app store to a calculator and email app. An amazing feat.
- jcelerier 4y ago
  Interesting, to this day I remember the Jolla as the only phone I ever had that I actively enjoyed using
mariusor 4y ago
I've been running Sailfish OS since they launched. Currently I do it on a Sony Xperia 10 III. It does all the things expected of a phone.

josteink 4y ago

> The problem with alternative phone OS:es is that in the country I live you must have either an iPhone or and Android phone because the ID monopoly and Payment monopoly refuse to support other operating systems... In theory its possible to run a user-land Android subsystem on Linux (and thus on Linux phones) via Anbox or Waydroid. In practice, I've never tried this on my PinePhone since I never needed it, so I have no idea how well this works or of it works at all. [1] https://anbox.io/ https://anbox.io/ [2] https://github.com/waydroid/waydroid https://github.com/waydroid/waydroid

lrvick 4y ago

Carry plastic ID. Carry cash. I do not know any first world country that has a constitution that requires you accept the terms of service of Apple or Google to function as a citizen.